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The CMS experiment puts physics onto the menu

When the LHC operates at peak luminosity, about a 1000 million interactions will be produced and detected each second at the heart of the CMS experiment. However, only a tiny fraction of these events will be of major importance. As in many particle-physics experiments, a trigger system selects the most interesting physics in real time so that data from just a few of the collisions are recorded. The remaining events – the vast majority – are discarded and cannot be recovered later. The trigger system, therefore, in effect determines the physics potential of the experiment for ever.